Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food

Jacob Israelow is the founder of Dirt Capital Partners, an investment platform that partners with regenerative farmers and ranchers to help them secure long-term access to the land they farm—and ultimately own it. He left Goldman Sachs and returned to the New York area in 2012, bringing a background in real estate and investing and a growing interest in local food systems. After spending about a year talking to hundreds of farmers, land trusts and others across the Northeast, he built Dirt Capital around a simple question: could investment capital help good farmers become landowners without taking value away from them?

The mechanic at the heart of Dirt Capital is a lease-purchase model. The fund buys a piece of farmland alongside one specific farmer or rancher, signs a ten-year lease with a purchase option locked in at a pre-agreed price at year five and again at year ten, and lets that farmer buy the land back once their business, and their balance sheet, have caught up. It is a way to get farmers onto land conventional lenders will not yet finance, without turning them into permanent tenants.
In this episode, Koen and Jacob dig into what sits underneath that model: how Dirt Capital manages real estate risk while leaving the farm business risk to the farmer, why regenerative practices do not automatically make land worth more, what happens when a purchase does not go to plan, and how a firm that has put roughly $80 million to work over the past decade is about to try to raise $100 million for its next fund.

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Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:
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Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more here
Support the show
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In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.
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Five years ago, many people in the regenerative agriculture space thought that simply paying farmers for soil carbon storage would rewire the agricultural system in a heartbeat. It turned out to be considerably more difficult. The European soil carbon market has not scaled at the speed needed. The voluntary carbon market has not delivered the financing that was hoped for.
Is regulation part of the answer? The solar market suggests yes.
Christian Holzleitner is Head of Unit for Land Economy and Carbon Removals at DG CLIMA, European Commission, and one of the architects of the EU's Carbon Removal and Carbon Farming Regulation (CRCF). He is an economist by training who has spent his career designing market frameworks — including the EU's Innovation Fund and Modernization Fund — and is now applying the same logic to soil carbon.
This episode is part of the podcast's carbon series, supported by the OGCR project.
In this episode:
— Why the CRCF is designed to solve a bureaucratic problem: farmers reporting the same data five times for five different schemes
— How the solar feed-in tariff model could work for carbon farming — cover the funding gap until the market scales
— What the EU ETS reform means for demand outside the agricultural value chain
— Why a portfolio of small certified European projects is more attractive to institutional investors than a single large project in Africa
— Why peatland rewetting in Finland is the landscape-scale intervention that excites Christian most
— Why carbon is a means, not an objective — and what that means for how investors should think about this space
— His magic wand answer: a single call for European carbon farming projects in the next EU multiannual budget.
More about this episode.

Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!
Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:
https://gen-re.land/
Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more here
Support the show
=======
In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.
Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!

Only 4% of Benedikt Bösel's customers scanned the QR code on their meat — even though that code would have shown them the life of the specific cow they were eating, its pasture, its movement, everything. The other 96% either trusted the brand completely, or simply didn't care. That number sits at the centre of this conversation.
This episode was recorded live at Groundswell 2026, the UK's largest regenerative agriculture festival. Koen moderated a 55-minute panel on a question that matters as much to investors as to farmers: who actually benefits when data is collected from farms?
The four panellists: Ichsani Wheeler, soil scientist at the OpenGeoHub Foundation and satellite data researcher building an open-access soil registry; Benedikt Bösel, farmer of a 3,000-hectare operation in eastern Brandenburg running a digital twin alongside the physical farm; Antony Yousefian, co-founder of The First Thirty, an investment firm building the data infrastructure to turn farms into preventative healthcare systems; and Matthijs Westerwoudt, co-founder of Wilder Land, building what he calls a Strava for biodiversity using AI-powered acoustic monitoring.
Video credit @Commonland.
In this session:
— Why Benedikt says most farm data has been useless — and what is finally changing
— Why Antony believes the cost of communicating with plants has collapsed
— The NHS values one quality-adjusted life year at £30,000 — and why that number should reframe the entire food system
— The 2013 US case where aggregated farm data was used to set surveillance pricing on inputs against the farmers who generated it
— Why only 4% of customers scanned the QR code with full cow data — and what that tells us about the real entry point to consumer behaviour change
— How Wilder Land is turning bird species counts into a biodiversity score farmers can put on a product label
— What Benedikt's wife's iron levels after birth have to do with all of this
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This session is part of the AI 4 Soil Health project which aims to help farmers and policy makers by providing new tools powered by AI to monitor and predict soil health across Europe. For more information visit ai4soilhealth.eu.
Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!
Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:
https://gen-re.land/
Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more here
Support the show
=======
In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
👩🏻‍💻 VISIT OUR WEBSITE 
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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.
Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!

Eric Smith is the founder of Edacious, a company building the infrastructure to make food quality and nutrient density measurable, objective and comparable. After spending years building a nutrition-testing platform capable of measuring macronutrients, micronutrients, bioactives and phytochemicals, alongside the benchmarks and data systems needed to make those measurements useful, he returns to sit down with us to share what they have been building, how the field of nutritional testing has evolved, and the critical insights they have uncovered.

At the heart of Eric's work is a simple belief:  if consumers can access and verify the quality of their food, they will demand products grown in ways that prioritize soil health and regenerative practices. This increased market demand will structurally direct more money into the pockets of farmers and land stewards, enabling them to expand regenerative agriculture across more hectares, creating a self-sustaining loop of human and ecological health. To ground this concept in science, Edacious leverages the GEMP framework—Genetics by Environment by Management practice equals Yield by Nutrition—moving beyond subjective labels to deliver objective, verified data.

This episode is a deep, down-to-earth dive into the nuts and bolts of quality, nutrient density, and systemic agricultural change. Eric teases the science behind Edacious' preeminent nutrition lab, which has processed over 6,000 food samples and generated nearly a million analytical data points. The conversation exposes the compromises of industrial crop breeding through the story of carrots, compares apples to apples, reveals the massive nutritional differences hidden in the skins of produce, and explores how Eric's own eating habits have transformed since he gained direct access to the data, including a surprising advocacy for frozen food and ancient grains.
More about this episode.
Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!
Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:
https://gen-re.land/
Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more here
Support the show
=======
In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
👩🏻‍💻 VISIT OUR WEBSITE 
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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.
Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!

Abby Rose is an experienced agricultural storyteller, co-host of the award-winning podcast Farmerama Radio, and co-founder of the soil monitoring and data platform VidaCycle. With a background spanning technology and hands-on farming on her family's farm in Chile, Abby has spent nearly a decade amplifying the voices of the regenerative farming movement and creating tools to help farmers build healthier soils.
This July, Abby is back on the podcast to share an update on Cereal, her six-part series podast uncovering the polarised world of cereals, from seed to loaf, and Cereal Revisited, which returned to the series years later to ask what happened after people listened. What did those stories change? And what does that tell us about the power of storytelling to change the regenerative agriculture system?
When two podcasters walk into the ‘recording studio’ for a conversation, the central question is bigger than podcasting: is good storytelling one of the most neglected and underfunded pieces of the regenerative agriculture and food transition? If people are going to change careers, start farms, build food companies, become millers or join the agroecological movement, they first need to see and feel that another way of working is possible. Cereal offers a striking case study: farmers started operating their own mills, listeners went on pilgrimages to meet people featured in the series, and at least one listener moved from engineering into milling.
Koen van Seijen and Abby Rose — two regenerative agriculture podcasters — turn the microphone back on themselves. They talk about what six relatively simple episodes did years after release, why systemic storytelling is difficult to fund, and why the hero’s journey may be the wrong model for food systems.
More about this episode.
Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!
Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:
https://gen-re.land/
Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more here
Support the show
=======
In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
👩🏻‍💻 VISIT OUR WEBSITE 
📚 JOIN OUR VIDEO COURSE 
💪🏻 SUPPORT OUR WORK
Join Gumroad
Share it
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Buy us a coffee… or a meal! 
=======
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=======
The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.
Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!